Flexible handling robot system for cloth using 3-D sensor

One of the requirements for the service robot is a automatic tidying operation, and it includes laundry handling. But flexible objects such as clothes are hard to be handled by robots. To handle flexible objects, 3-D Vision systems and flexible handling mechanism are indispensable. We have been developing the clothes handling robot system for linen supply factories. The purpose of this system is to input washing clothes to the pressing and folding line. This system mainly consists of the vision sensors with stereo cameras and a pattern projector and the robot system with two flexible hands. There are three steps to handle clothes. They are; (1) to pick up one cloth from piled clothes, (2) to grasp one corner of a cloth, (3) to grasp one edge of a cloth. In this paper, cloth handling robot system is evaluated experimentally, and this result shows that our robot system has ability to handle clothes.